Might be a long one…

My boyfriend and I had a huge fight the other day, and there has been obvious tension ever since… I’m TRYING to see, and therefore understand his perspective… but I’m just missing a few things…

Long story short, he used me as the “butt of a joke” publicly; he knew it when he did it and apologized as soon as I said something, and I did so in a very calm manner… what I hadn’t planned for, was everything else that followed.

I’ve survived a lot of trauma in my life, and public ridicule is just the tip of the iceberg… I’m in therapy, working through my shit bit by bit, but the way my brain snowballed… it happened so fast I couldn’t even talk myself out of the mental hell I fell into. Upon the advice of my therapist, I told my boyfriend about one of my very worst sexual assaults. In the process, I hurt his feelings by saying “in some ways you remind me of him.”

I apologized for that remark, and I can see how hurtful it is… but some of the others he’s brought to my attention… the only thing I can think to myself is “it has nothing to do with you…”. Now I didn’t say that to him, he’s wanting time to process and get his anger under control, work it out with his therapist…. He’s upset that I can’t see the way I’ve hurt him, that it’s not obvious to me, that he has to point it out… and while some of that is true, it very much appears that he’s mixing some of what I said, with his own trauma and scrambling them together for a huge mental and emotional mind fuck…

I don’t know if I’m actually asking for anything on here, but I don’t have friends to talk to, to work things out with… I’m just beginning therapy, he’s said several times that I need to be “better resourced.” Which I agree… but what do we do in the meantime… I don’t want to say or do anything more to cause further harm, but by not saying and doing anything… IS an action itself… I dunno, my mind is just spinning…

If you read this far, drop some encouraging words.